No, it's not. It's awful. I've written apps in it for feed inventory programs, and it's hideous.
In combination with the Cocoa frameworks, it is the preferred language for Mac and iPhone software development.
Preferred because the fascists at Apple essentially block all other languages on the iPhone. How long would it survive if the JVM were permitted on the iPhone or iPod/Touch? About a week. As for Mac Apps, I believe you will find the big name apps on the Mac are written mostly in C++.
It can interoperate with C++ code or whatever.
No thanks to Apple. C++ interoperability,as far as I know, is a gnu innovation.
Judging from the number of new iPhone apps at the iTunes Store, it is becoming a popular language.
It's so popular that the estimated number of developers is <1%. Nobody sensible would code in it on the iPhone if there were allowed alternatives (although Novell has just ported C# to the platform.)
The stupidest language ever was probably plain old "C" language,
Not even close. Try COBOL, or any variant of FORTRAN <= FORTRAN IV. Or any version of Visual Basic in any implementation. I could go on and on.
had to scan an entire string to return a character count.
It is trivial to prove that there is, in general, no other way to do this, so I'm not sure what point you think you're making. That the compiler should do that for you? But it's still being done whether you think so or not. If you're of the opinion that the language should do it for you, and then store the length of the string, you would be violating one of the design objectives of C, which was to incorporate as few assumptions about application specific data as possible. There are plenty of libs for "C" that can do this. [Remarkably, even fairly talentless programmers can do it themselves.]
Its weakness as a language has been the source of many security problems, especially on Windows.
What nonsense. This is like the claim that we need to regulate guns because an Islamic terrorist has just murdered 13 people in Texas, or that the government gets to regulate or even outlaw what vegetables you're allowed to have in your pocket because some people smoke them. C doesn't kill programs, programmers kill programs. The weakness of the "language" is a weakness in the IQ and/or discipline of people writing code. 90% of coders shouldn't be. Unfortunately, there's too much code for the other 10% to write.
"Especially on Windows" is even sillier. What do you think Unix and its variants are written in? Objective-C?
Well, that's one man's opinion. Maybe object-oriented design isn't your specialty. Apple's development tools get generally good reviews in the industry - and they're free with each Mac sold.
Apple's market capitalization will exceed Microsoft's in the foreseeable future. Be prepared.